Unicode input

Characters can be entered either by selecting them from a display, by typing a certain sequence of keys on a physical keyboard, or by drawing the symbol by hand on touch-sensitive screen.

Historic scripts, but also many modern symbols and pictographs (such as emoticons, emojis, playing cards and many CJK characters) have 5-digit codes.

[6] Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program, appearing in the consumer edition since XP.

[8] More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap, which supports all Unicode characters).

[9] Generally these tools let the user "copy" the selected characters into the clipboard, and then paste them into the document, rather than pretending to directly type them.

Some programs running in Microsoft Windows, including recent versions of Word and Notepad, can produce characters from their Unicode code points expressed in decimal and entered on the numeric keypad with the Alt key held down.

In programs which were not designed to handle Alt codes over 255, the character retrieved usually corresponds to the remainder when the number is divided by 256.

The installed set can be augmented by custom mnemonics defined for arbitrary code points, specified in decimal.

Hexadecimal Unicode input can be enabled by adding a string type (REG_SZ) value called EnableHexNumpad to the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method and assigning the value data 1 to it.

Users will need to log off and back in after editing the registry for this input method to start working.

[citation needed] In some applications (Word, Notepad and LibreOffice programs) Alt+X will replace the hexadecimal number to the left of the cursor with the matching Unicode character.

Example: In HTML/XML, the copyright sign © (U+00A9) may be coded as: This works in many pieces of software that accept HTML markup, such as Thunderbird and Wikipedia editing.